Scan 48
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1909
6 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 14. See the scan on archive.org.
1About fifty years later than the date of North's "Memoirs of Music" appeared the famous work of Martinus Gerbertus, entitled, "De Cantu et Musicâ Sacrâ." Among the valuable manuscripts referred to by the author is one which supplies the earliest known representation of a bow instrument of the Fiddle kind, and which may be accepted as a description of German Fiddle. The date of this particular manuscript has been ascribed by M. Fétis to the ninth century. It may possibly have belonged to an earlier period.1
3introduced by Arabs into Southern Europe, and may be the precursor of all our modern stringed instruments," says, "From this view I am compelled to dissent," and speaks in favour of the Northern origin. William Chappell, "Popular Music of the Olden Times," remarks: "I will not follow M. Fétis in his newly adopted Eastern theory of the bow. The only evidence he adduces is its present use in the East, and the primitive form of Eastern instruments." "I would ask how comes it that the bow was unknown to the Greeks and the Romans? Did not Alexander the Great conquer India and Persia? And were not those countries better known to the ancients than to the modern until within the last three hundred years? The Spaniards derived their instruments from the Moors, but the bow was not among them."
51 As the manuscript was destroyed by the fire which burnt nearly the whole of the buildings, Abbey, Church, and Library of St. Blasius in the Black Forest in 1768, the language of Gerbertus, who examined the original manuscript, is worthy of some attention. After referring to certain plates, copied from a manuscript of the year 600, he says that "the other twenty-three representations on the following eighth plate" (in which is included the early German Fiddle) "are from a manuscript a little more recent." Whether the period
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